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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - This year looks set to be the “tipping point” for electric cars, Arnoud Balhuizen, chief commercial officer at global miner BHP (BLT.L) said on Tuesday, with the impact for raw materials producers to be felt first in the metals market, and only later in oil.

Some people live their existence in a great state of dread, convinced a totalitarian, centralized world government of sorts is in our future. Not only do I not think this is going to happen, but I predict the exact opposite will occur. I believe the world has already hit “peak centralization” and decentralization will be the defining trend of human existence on this planet going forward.

When one of the first personal computers, the Altair 8800 came along in 1976, Microsoft was ready with a programming language, Altair BASIC. It wants to be equally prepared when quantum computers go mainstream, so it has unveiled a ne programming language and other tools for the futuristic tech at its Ignite conference. You'll still need to understand Qubits and other weird concepts, but by integrating traditional languages like C# and Python, Microsoft will make it easier to do mainstream computing on the complex machines.

General Motors' strong competitive position in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is widely underestimated by investors, according to a Wall Street firm. Deutsche Bank raised its rating on the automaker's shares to buy from hold, saying the company will attain a large market share of the new AV market.

Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It’s an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars — and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region.

Best Buy's attempts to fend off the looming retail apocalypse took a huge hit on Tuesday. At its first investor day since 2012, the company issued long-term forecasts that fell short of analyst expectations, stoking fears that mounting competition from the likes of Amazon will eat into future profits. The reaction from investors was swift and punishing, as Best Buy's stock dropped as much as 10% to $51.61, wiping out roughly $1.7 billion in market value at its lows for the day.

Russian media has conducted interviews with several representatives of the country’s bitcoin mining industry. The investigation has provided unique insights into an expansive industry that penetrates all levels of Russian society, ranging “from schoolchildren to pensioners”.

You know a topic is trending when the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly bicker about its potential risks and rewards. In this case, Musk says he fears artificial intelligence will lead to World War III because nations will compete for A.I. superiority. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has called such doomsday scenarios “irresponsible” and says he is optimistic about A.I.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they change for the better. A fever is an example. To a certain point, fever rises to an intense degree to chase out the pathogens of the common flu. However, if the heat hits a certain point, it injures more than it helps. Climate change has already reached (passed) a life-threatening stage. It is plain that the beginnings of pollution and climate change trouble came with our “modern” industrial age. Yet, modern research and technology are also key to returning to a stable climate and clean air.

There are times when Google completely baffles us by adding a feature that we didn't even remotely think could be possible, or needed, or useful. Like now for example, there's a new Search bar when you visit the list of Assistant actions. How groundbreaking!

Virtual reality is being implemented into every aspect of education. From the top levels of higher education to amateur video tutorials, VR is quickly becoming a vital component of how we learn. In late 2016, learning in virtual reality has become reality: Teachers take their classes on virtual trips. Nowadays, an enormous amount of creativity and energy is directed at bringing VR to the classroom.

Microsoft, Facebook, and the telecoms infrastructure company Telxius have announced the completion of the highest capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is capable of transmitting 160 terabits of data per second, the equivalent of streaming 71 million HD videos at the same time, and 16 million times faster than an average home internet connection, Microsoft claims. The cable will be operational by early 2018.

Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY, visited with CNBC on Friday to discuss cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and Ethereum in general. The discussion was a bit convoluted which is indicative of the confusion within the mainstream media and financial services space but Urbach countered Jamie Dimon’s assertion that the government will shut Bitcoin down by explaining you would have to shut down the internet to accomplish that feat.

If you were Apple, what tricks would you utilize to increase the sales of your latest product? If you know corporations, you’d know they use any possible trick they can as a generality to increase their profit: think of how huge a factor it would make in the sale of new iPhones if the old ones became slower. People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model.

When it comes to bench-racing electric vehicles, the kilowatt-hour is king. And over in Switzerland, there's an EV that will make Tesla's P100Ds look positively puny. But this is no carbon-fiber hypercar, and it's never going set any records for 0-60 times or the standing quarter. No, this is an altogether more practical creation that's meant to work for a living. It's a Komatsu quarry truck that's being modified by Kuhn Schweiz and Lithium Storage, weighing in at almost 50 tons (45 tonnes) and powered by a whopping 700kWh battery pack.

Speaking on Monday with members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, the president of the European Central Bank said it is not in its power to "prohibit or regulate" digital currencies such as the Bitcoin. The size, users' acceptance, and impact on the real economy are the main channels to look at in the market in terms of risk, but it is still "premature to consider" digital currencies as means of payment for the future, Mario Draghi claimed.

The battle lines have been drawn between sovereign governments and the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies, warned anti virus software pioneer John McAfee during the first global blockchain technology event in Hong Kong since China imposed a ban on cryptocurrency sales and trading on exchanges earlier this month. Among core issues in the US$150 billion industry are how nations can apply taxation to cryptocurrency transactions and whether there should be curbs on the ability for bitcoin and other virtual currencies to facilitate global fund flows.

If Facebook’s algorithms were executives, the public would be demanding their heads on a stick, such was the ugly incompetence on display this week. First, the company admitted a “fail” when its advertising algorithm allowed for the targeting of anti-Semitic users. Then on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said he was handing over details of more than 3,000 advertisements bought by groups with links to the Kremlin, a move made possible by the advertising algorithms that have made Mr Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire.

SpaceX has filed documents seeking to trademark the name “Starlink” for a satellite network that could provide global broadband access to data and video services as well as Earth imagery and remote sensing. The California company’s satellite unit operates primarily out of facilities in Redmond, Wash., and is working stealthily to develop a constellation of thousands of satellites that would be launched into low Earth orbit.

Cloudflare, a major internet security firm, is on a mission to render distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks useless. The company announced Monday that every customer—including those who only use its free services—will receive a new feature called Unmetered Mitigation, which protects against every DDoS attack, regardless of its size. Cloudflare believes the move is set to level the internet security playing field: Now every website will be able to fight back against DDoS attacks for free. But the illegal practice has been a hallmark of digital activism since the 1990s. What will happen to it now?

John B. Goodenough, an emeritus professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, pioneered the lithium-ion battery technology that is now the industry standard, and now the 94-year-old is ready to push the envelope on battery innovation again. Goodenough along with senior research fellow Maria Helena Braga, lead a team of researchers who have developed a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is safer and more efficient than existing lithium-ion technology.

This month, millions of children returned to school. This year, an unprecedented number of them will learn to code. Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American schools now offer coding classes – up from only 25% a few years ago. New York, with the largest public school system in the country, has pledged to offer computer science to all 1.1 million students by 2025.

The race is on: who will be the first to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in the United States? In Europe, there is already a Bitcoin exchange traded note (ETN) available to investors. In the U.S., it is widely anticipated a Bitcoin ETF will be be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) very soon.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have solved a long-standing issue in the creation of untethered soft robots whose actions and movements can help mimic natural biological systems. A group in the Creative Machines lab led by Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, has developed a 3D-printable synthetic soft muscle, a one-of-a-kind artificial active tissue with intrinsic expansion ability that does not require an external compressor or high voltage equipment as previous muscles required.

An international group of cryptography experts has forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.